Jennifer Brannigan

Graduate Studio Work

Spring 2017

As I’ve started to work on my practice through my fall semester some things have changed since the summer. For example, during the summer I geared my work towards the environment and our impact on nature. Specifically endangered birds and their diminishing numbers due to human progression and the pollution of water. As I have started to work this fall and spring I have looked to myself to make my work more personal to my experience as an educator, artist, and woman. I’ve always created settings that I thought were parallel to our own, with natural blues, greens, and browns, and layered images of pine trees and other natural and man-made occurrences. However, I have now looked at the land I now own as a main source of inspiration. Working hard for something that you and your partner have strived for often takes up a lot of mind space. As I am working, I think about where I am in my life and what’s important, in my opinion, to share.
Currently I am still very much interested in nature and our impact on it. I recently watched the documentary minimalism and how we really don’t need all of the things that we buy or consume. It started to make me question my artwork in relation to how I live my life. Am I creating worlds or fantasies that reflect what I want from my own personal life? I’m still trying to figure this out. I am excited to start working on my own piece of land and living holistically. My partner and I have decided, before anything else that we will start a garden to sustain ourselves that best way that we can. As I’ve started to work more on the property, I have thought about what influenced me to get to where I am today. What is important to me? Why is it important? I have been always been interested in my environment and I have now started to believe that all of the trees, mostly douglas furs, in my work have been influenced by my child hood. My childhood home had 32 pine trees that lined our front yard, I would wake up to them every morning, and I have always been attracted to how they look. It reminds me of some sort of enchanted forest and I’m proud that it’s mine. When I was a child I was always fascinated by the fantastical, and things that didn’t exist. I still am today. My work is a combination of what I see on my property, and creating layers upon layers to make each work feel dream like or other worldly.
I have been looking at artists that create site-specific work in an abstract way. I continue to look at Julie Mehretu, from the summer and I have recently found contemporary artist Heather Day, along with Katie Pumphrey and Yellena James. All of which have similar ideas or color components that make them visually and conceptually pleasing to me. I’ve been finding that creating on a daily basis, even on commission has put me in the same mindset of these ladies. Meaning, I am working on what is around me in a visual response that might be farther away from reality than I would have initially done. For the spring I have been investigating more artist, and the one that has impacted my work the most has been Emil Ferris and her groundbreaking graphic novel “My Favorite Things Are Monsters”. She uses all ballpoint pen to create really beautiful and layered drawings of art that you cannot look away from. I have started to also use ball point pen as it layers better under the washes of ink than charcoal or graphite would. It also creates really intricate drawings that don’t smudge or move.
As I move forward, I need to create art work either on site, or where ever I am in order to find out what I need to pursue, As I have mentioned earlier I recently watched the Minimalist Documentary and it impacted me in a way that I didn’t expect. I am curious about my own American dream and living in a way that reduces my carbon footprint, along with questions about why we live the way that we do. I will have to further my research in order to get a good grasp on all that I am thinking about currently.
Right now I am exploring what I have mentioned above, I unfortunately have not been able to make a larger piece of work about this, as much as I have dreamt about these ideas. It is something that will probably manifest itself naturally in my work. Working through paint, inks, and watercolor I am planning on moving my work in a more personal direction. I have looked at artist’s such as Heather Day to further my idea of documenting my life through a visual and abstract way. I am planning on using the land that I own, along with my life as an art educator to further this with extensions the real world with parallel components through out.
Through out the spring semester I have been working on layered ink washed art works that I work on simultaneously. My first paintings were small and I took a lot of pictures and chose areas that I thought would make cohesive compositions. I looked at the colors of the photo and exaggerated them with the ink washes. I even used metallics to add layers of dimension and a hazy or dream life quality to them. I uses the numbers that were meaningful to the property i.e geological coordinates, acreage, lot number etc. I found that is gave some of the works an industrial feel. This often happens when humans get involved in things, and I’m not sure if I will use them again as I move forward.
The second set of paintings were a little larger, and I found that I was making them too muddy by adding too much information to them. However, I did gather a lot of ideas to put into future art works. For one, I found that close up images or abstracted India ink trees work well visually, and it is something that is so predominate on the property that it need to be kept. No matter the time of day, some of the trees are always in the dark. The property was is an old Christmas tree farm, and a lot of the trees are close together. This also leads to really amazing little paths that look like little alley ways to new worlds. I also found that I need to either add the unorganized splatter, or the India ink, but not both together. Compositionally it looks too dark and over whelming.
The last painting that I’ve done I went larger and in a different direction. I started to use ball point pen to make the drawings that I was doing darker, more layered. It also helped that it didn’t smudge or disappear when I layered the ink over it. For the future, I am going to use more detailed drawings that almost come across as abstract, within my paintings. This brings the viewer into the work in a way that the washes didn’t. It slows down the eye and unlike the washes that would come across flat at times. As I move forward with my work, I’m going to make larger works that incorporate ideas from the property, detailed ball point pen drawings, and abstractions that are in references to what I experience in my life. I am going to use larger pieces of paper and abstract the drawing even more.

Taylor Coleman

ARE 517

Studio Plan Draft

 

Memories are funny in the way that you want to share them but you need to share them with the right people. I know I’ve been in situations where I’ve told someone a memory and they just didn’t find it as funny or meaningful. You know, one of those you-had-to-be-there moments. In my work, I’m looking to invite the viewer into my memories visually.

Throughout the spring semester, I will be creating one digital memory drawing based on place and memory. These memories will be based on my relationship that I keep very private and focus on memories that are candid and quiet yet meaningful. They are not memories that would normally be shared but rather unspoken memories that define the relationship. I will upload four in progress drawings per week as well as the final drawing. I will also include feelings, colors and objects associated with these candid moments. I will log these feelings for more accurate portrayals. This log will be the basis of my research for the summer studio session. I will be looking for feedback from my peers and asking myself which five digital paintings are the most successful in terms of colors, feelings and portrayal of a memory.

Eventually over the summer I will choose five of my digital memory paintings to use as inspiration for five large paintings. Originally, my plan for the summer show is to hang the paintings horizontally with the smaller digital painting underneath each painting. These paintings were going to be abstract representations of those memories using only the colors, shapes and feelings that I had logged and used in my digital painting. Now, I have decided to use my digital paintings as sketches and recreate them on a larger scale as oil paintings. I am hoping to finish one painting per week. That means I will have five paintings in total to hang for the summer show.

There are a few mentor artists that I have chosen for inspiration. Fredrick Church was an American Hudson River landscape painter that worked with Thomas Cole in his house. Church created paintings that were very realistic but also emotionally engaging. He took a systematic approach to his paintings, sometimes returning to the landscape over the course of a few years. I really liked the way that he used light and mist in his paintings. They’re very captivating. I’m not sure if I could create paintings like these. He took his time with his paintings, which is one thing that I can not do at this time. His paintings made me feel like traveling to the specific place but it didn’t make me feel like I was there or that I could feel the emotion. That is what I am trying to portray in my digital paintings. I am trying to invite the viewer into a memory in a non-intrusive way, almost like they were walking by. His paintings were also inspiring in the way that they captured light and created space in his paintings. To me its as if he was inviting me into his own memories.

Currently my work has been focused mainly around material exploration. This spring semester has started with my continuation in encaustic exploration; the exploration that started at the end of the fall semester and continued on into our winter session. Recently, I have been completing 8×10 inch pieces that involve the incorporation of pan pastels, oil paints, and actually painting with pigmented encaustic. So far, my exploration has resulted in favoring layering Pan Pastels. I want to proceed in this direction with placing a second layer with another image. One image will be a photo transfer and the other will be with the application of more pan pastels. I might also attempt creating transparent layers of encaustic paint over the Pan Pastel. My plan that I worked out over winter might need to be a little altered. The details that will be required for the application of images takes me roughly four hours for one layer with Pan Pastels (not including the second layer that will involve an image transfer or painting). With that said, the numbers of completed final pieces might be hard to accomplish. I am hoping to finish up with material exploration by the 13th of February. Once I complete that, and figure out the method I will be using, I want to collect material images around Rochester.
The images that I will be collecting will pertain to my conceptual focus. I am looking at visual culture within the city of Rochester. The images that I will be utilizing will include two images. Those two images will have some sort of juxtaposition that will in turn hopefully question conceived perceptions the imagery evokes.
Once I have decided on the images that will be used, I still have the intention of removing areas of the encaustic wax to highlight the image below. I will also block out areas on the top layer with cross hatching of layers of colored wax over the encaustic paint. This is intended as a form of beautification to direct the viewers’ eye to areas I perceive to be important to the conceptual theme. This is the more immediate form of encaustic exploration that will take place in the next few weeks.

At the winter session, I showed a variety of different works and chose to pursue my painted photographs depicting my feelings about a place. Throughout the Spring semester, I will be continuing to do so through daily studies collected in a workbook, similar to the small pieces I brought to winter session on the standard printer paper. These studies will be presented each week. At the same time, I will be working more with trying new ways of utilizing different mediums, including different techniques in transferring images to work with. The start of the semester will be focused primarily on more traditional paper materials, including photo paper, card stock, and canvas paper. Images of these experiments in processes will also be shared as they are made each week for feedback and thoughts from everyone.

As the semester goes on, I will continue to experiment with different techniques, including working on alternative surfaces (currently canvas (primed & unprimed), wood, and slate). I will also be continuing my daily studies, continuing to paint on photographs in response to letting out my feelings/anxiety from the day and serving as inspiration for my final works. By April, I hope to have chosen a definite medium/transfer process to pursue and begin to create my final works getting at least 6 done by the time Summer semester starts. I think it would also be interesting to present my workbook along side the final works in the summer show as it help depicts the processes that I have gone through.

Taylor Coleman

ARE 517

Studio Plan Draft

Throughout the spring semester, I will be creating one digital memory drawing based on place and memory. These memories will be based on my relationship that I keep very private and focus on memories that are candid and quiet yet meaningful. They are not memories that would normally be shared or curated to be shared, but rather unspoken memories that define the relationship.  I will upload four in progress drawings per week as well as the final drawing. I will also include feelings, colors and objects associated with these candid moments. I will log these feelings for more accurate portrayals. This log will be the basis of my research for the summer studio session. I will be looking for feedback from my peers and asking myself which five digital paintings are the most successful in terms of colors, feelings and portrayal of a memory.

Eventually over the summer I will choose five of my digital memory paintings to use as inspiration for five large paintings. These paintings will be abstract representations of those memories using only the colors, shapes and feelings that I had logged and used in my digital painting. I am hoping to finish one painting per week. Since I don’t normally sketch out my paintings in advance, I don’t plan on creating a sketch of my abstract painting but rather let the painting develop naturally. I will use oil paint since it does not dry right away and is my preferred medium.  My plan for the summer show is to hang the paintings horizontally with the smaller digital painting underneath each painting.

 

Here’s what you wrote on the 15th.  You can use this as  the basis of your initial draft summer plan, due Next Monday, Jan 30